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Originally Posted by GoPacers
(Post 1746946)
There is NO DATA to support this statement. We have absolutely no idea how many people have been exposed to the virus at this point. We only know how many people have tested positive. Increased testing for the disease and an antibody test that helps us know how many people have been infected will give us the necessary data to accurately determine the denominator. Until then, statements like this are uninformed at best.
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There will never be complete, actual hard data, either for COVID-19 or the flu. It is impossible to completely measure and will always rely on extrapolation and estimates, which will change with time and reporting. Meanwhile, there are
plenty of estimates available (google: COVID-19 mortality rate). From MarketWatch, for example, speaking of the worldwide deaths:
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"Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, said at a press briefing in Geneva. That’s more than previous estimates of around 2% and the influenza fatality rate of less than 1%."
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The same report also admits:
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"The WHO fatality rate estimate could be related to officials underestimating the number of actual cases. If infections are actually higher globally, the fatality rate would obviously fall. The more time asymptomatic people spend going about their daily lives, the more people can become infected."
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Will coronavirus kill you? Why fatality rates for COVID-19 vary wildly depending on age, gender, medical history and country - MarketWatch
These estimates change continuously. According to the National Review,
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"Dr. Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, has testified that COVID-19 could be ten times more lethal than influenza. The latter has about a 0.1 percent fatality rate, so that suggests that the COVID-19 rate is about 1 percent. Yet, Dr. Fauci has written (in the New England Journal of Medicine), that “the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%,” if we assume that “the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases.”
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Coronavirus Pandemic: U.S. Fatality Rate Steady at About 1 Percent | National Review
As more numbers comes in, and better estimates of non-symptomatic and/or unreported infections are included, the mortality rate will almost certainly drop. As of 4/15/2020 however, according to the CDC, there had been 24,582 deaths out of 605,390 "both confirmed and probable cases" in the U.S. & territories. Doing the math, this results in over 4% of
reported cases. There would have to be nearly another 1.9 million additional, unreported cases to bring the mortality rate down below 1%.
Cases in U.S. | CDC
Quote:
Originally Posted by GoPacers
(Post 1746946)
In addition, everybody does NOT have a 99.9% chance of surviving the flu. You're taking a population based probability and assigning it to each and every individual which is simply not how it works. If that were the case the mortality rates would be the same for all demographics.
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By everybody, I am talking about the U.S. population in general, not individually. OK,
statistically speaking, we all have a 99.9% chance of surviving the flu. Semantically better, but the same odds.